As someone who grew up watching Star Wars, it's weird to realize that C-3PO was essentially an AI. So was R2-D2. Two AI's that had dominion over their own bodies, and nothing further. That's not the future, however. Figure AI, one of the startups leading the humanoid robot development space, has developed an AI model called Helix. Helix can serve as a collective brain for multiple robots, allowing them to work together on shared tasks. And it's fairly "smart." It's a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model which combines visual perception with language comprehension and fine motor control. In this demonstration, two Helix-equipped 'bots are given a task they've never been asked to do before, with objects they've never seen. They're given two piles of random grocery itemsa mixture of dry goods and refrigerated items--and tasked with figuring out how to store them:Okay, the hand-offs are as creepy as they are elegant. And as with 1X's NEO Gamma demo, the robots' silence and lack of facial expressions is unnerving. I just find them too unsettling to be relatable or to want these things in my house. I think I might prefer it if one of them was always smoking cigarettes while off-duty (lit by the other robot, of course) just to give them some personality.As with NEO Gamma, no release date or pricing has been announced.